


saturn dreaming of mercury

by verdenal



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Frottage, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Keith (Voltron), Pre-Kerberos Mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 01:17:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15961598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdenal/pseuds/verdenal
Summary: Keith makes his way into the Galaxy Garrison, Takashi Shirogane's heart, and the pilot's seat of the Kerberos mission.He beats his previous time by a full thirty seconds. No fancy maneuvers, nothing but clean flying and tight turns. When it ends, Keith gets up and exits the simulator without a word. He shoves his registration form into the cadet’s hand without waiting for any other instructions. The cadet takes it as an automatic reflex, but when he sees that Keith is turning away without another word he calls out for him to wait.Keith does turn to face him, which he regrets, because the cadet is more handsome than Keith had previously realized, and there’s something about his expression – wide open, vulnerable, tinged with what can’t possibly be longing – that almost convinces Keith to stay.





	saturn dreaming of mercury

**Author's Note:**

> Title is yanked from an episode of Millenium
> 
> Originally my sbb entry was going to include the 3-part Shiro POV sequel to this, but life got in the way, so that will come much later. Instead I bring this humble Keith POV pre-Kerb offering. 
> 
> find me on tumblr @weird-tint!

Everyone knows that the Galaxy Garrison public recruitment events are scams, but that doesn’t stop Keith from heading down to the community center where they’ve installed themselves. He’s only going because he’s heard they’ve brought the flight simulator with them, and Keith has been itching to try one since he’d been sick the day the recruiters had come to his school. He doesn’t have any delusions of grandeur, unlike most of the people who come to give the simulator a shot. Keith knows he’s not going to blow anyone’s mind or somehow get selected to go to Galaxy Garrison. He just wants to get a taste of it. Hoverbikes are alright, but there’s only so much you can do with them, and by this point Keith has tried it all. He’s raced bikes and repaired them and taught himself as many tricks as he can think of. He’ll get his forty seconds of simulated space flight and then he’ll go back to a life on the ground.

The community center is a zoo. Everyone from the county who’s eligible to serve is there, and they’re all talking as loudly as they possibly can. The Garrison reps-an older man who looks like he’s been doing this his whole life and no longer cares what he hears, and a cadet, or perhaps a very young, very new officer, who’s wide-eyed and obviously nervous-are trying to corral everyone into some sort of orderly line. There’s paperwork to fill out first, and the fact that basically all you have to do is put down your name, age, and address is a concrete sign that the Garrison isn’t here to find their newest crop of fighter pilots. 

Keith watches the parade of disappointed faces go before him, and bounces from foot to foot, worried that he won’t even get a go at it. It feels like the line before him is endless, but everyone crashes so quickly that Keith finds himself next to go before he even realizes it. He hands his little form to the older officer, who waves him on without sparing him a glance. The cadet follows him into the simulator, where he points out to Keith all of the controls, and tells him he has “as much time as he needs” to get familiar with the space before he simulation starts. They both know that’s not true, but Keith appreciates the strained smile he gets before the young man exits the simulator.

Keith has read at least three different manuals for flight simulators, but it still takes him at least fifteen seconds to get himself oriented. Fifteen seconds is a very short time, but fifteen seconds is also an eternity. He leans back towards the open door and gives a thumbs up, eyes averted. The door shuts, and Keith shifts in his seat. The simulation starts.

Keith had prepared himself for something daring and exciting: a rescue mission, or threading his way through an asteroid field, or evading enemy fighters. He was ready for a scene out of Star Wars, and what he gets instead is like an old arcade game but with more realistic zero-g. He might as well make his own fun, then. 

The controls are smoother than most of the bikes he’s used, and he’s never been out of orbit, so Keith takes advantage of his new range of motion and barrel rolls. He zips around the obstacles that the simulation places in his path, slow-moving pieces of space junk, mostly. At first he makes wide, elegant arcs, but there’s no rush in that, so he makes his turns tighter and tighter until he gets so close to the space junk that he could reach out and touch it. If it were real, if he were in space and also somehow able to stick his arm out of his ship. A lot of coulds, and weres, and ifs, but that’s how it goes on the ground.

When it ends Keith is breathless and he realizes has hand are shaking. There wasn’t even a landing sequence, which he had been planning for (or dreaming of, an even split). Takeoffs and landings are the things he can’t really approximate on a bike and it kills him, because he wants the feeling of breaking out of orbit and the feeling of plunging back into it, too.

Oh well. 

The door opens with a hiss and a clunk, and Keith turns towards it, expecting the younger man and his awkward smile. Instead, it’s the old guy, who looks furious for some reason. He marches over to the console without saying a word to Keith, which is fine by him, because he can’t imagine not smarting off. The guy’s not his CO, after all.

He glares at the controls and fiddles with the simulator’s log but he must not find what he’s looking for because he heads back to the door with a sour expression on his face.

“Do it again,” he says, and closes the door before Keith can protest. There are scores of people still in line and Keith can’t imagine that they’re happy about this. He wonders if the old guy’s going to tell them that he fucked up the sim, somehow, or if he’s just going to expect them to take it in stride.

The sim reboots without warning and Keith scrambles to get his head back in the game. This time there are asteroids in addition to the space junk, and they move more randomly and more quickly. Finally, Keith finds himself really engaged. It’s still just a “from point A to point B” kind of task but Keith will take it. 

This time, when the simulation ends, Keith is much calmer. If anything the increased difficulty reduced the shaking in his hands, and now he’s more eager than anything else. The older officer is at the door again, and Keith hopes this means he’ll get a third round, but instead he’s ordered to get out of the simulator and stand with the cadet behind the registration table.

“I’ll deal with you later,” he’s told, and then the next person goes into the simulator.

The cadet obviously doesn’t know what to do in this situation, and neither does Keith, so they stand side by side and try to look everywhere but at each other. Keith picks his registration form up from the table, just in case it somehow gets lost in the mess of papers, and folds and unfolds it until he’s afraid it’s going to disintegrate, and then he shoves it into his back pocket.

He’s fine with the silence that’s settling around his shoulders. The looks he’s getting are either envious or pitying, depending on what people think is going to happen to him. Keith himself doesn’t know, and he’s not going to allow himself to get his hopes up. He stares into the middle distance and thinks about what it had been like to the fly the simulator, if he’ll ever be content with just a hoverbike again. Well, at least on the bike he can feel the wind in his hair and against his cheeks. He’ll hold onto that. 

The cadet with him, on the other hand, is not coping well with this awkward situation. He keeps looking at Keith out of the corner of his eye, and Keith hopes the guy isn’t planning on doing stealth missions in the future, because he is not subtle at all. 

“You were good,” he tells Keith.

“What?”

“Just, uh, in case you were worried. You were good. In there.” He jerks a thumb towards the simulator.

“Oh.” Keith can feel his face burning.

He refuses to look at the cadet for the rest of the time. The cadet keeps sneaking glances at him that Keith senses more than sees. It makes him feel like he’s in a zoo, and he clenches his jaw and his fists to keep from doing something rash. The cadet’s words had shattered his plan to pretend that nothing was happening. Now he can’t ignore the fact that he’s the first person (as far as he knows) to have actually gotten Galaxy Garrison’s attention from a simulator performance.

The old guy doesn’t come back to talk to Keith until the demonstration is over. In that span of time Keith has: done several rounds of squats out of sheer boredom; been embarrassed by the fact that the cadet noticed him doing squats; run through every possible outcome in his head; and decided what to do for dinner.

“Do it again,” the officer says to Keith. 

Keith stares at him.

The cadet jumps in. “We don’t have any more training courses loaded on this one.”

Both Keith and the officer turn to stare at him. Keith is grateful but confused.

“He’ll just do the second one again. I want to watch.”

This is what Keith assumed would happen. He shrugs. “I didn’t cheat, so it’s fine. Let’s get it over with.”

Both the cadet and the officer look like they want to reprimand him for speaking so casually. Keith doesn’t give them the chance. Instead, he climbs back into the simulator and situates himself. He still remembers the second course and he contemplates how much showing off he can get away with, until the officer finally follows him in and Keith sees nothing but a cold contempt on his face, poorly masked.

That is an expression he's familiar with, and it brings an answering sneer to his face, as hidden by courtesy as he can manage, but the curl of his lip is impossible to stop. He can feel the officer's stare on the back of his neck as he sits, adjusts the seat, and runs his hands over the controls. A sudden calm falls over him as he waits for the sim to start. This is his ship, not the officer's, and he will prove it.

He beats his previous time by a full thirty seconds. No fancy maneuvers, nothing but clean flying and tight turns. When it ends, Keith gets up and exits the simulator without a word. He shoves his registration form into the cadet’s hand without waiting for any other instructions. The cadet takes it as an automatic reflex, but when he sees that Keith is turning away without another word he calls out for him to wait.

Keith does turn to face him, which he regrets, because the cadet is more handsome than Keith had previously realized, and there’s something about his expression – wide open, vulnerable, tinged with what can’t possibly be longing – that almost convinces Keith to stay. 

“My information’s all there,” he says, and then he catches the officer’s eye as he’s climbing out of the simulator. He takes whatever he sees as permission and starts again to leave. The cadet doesn’t call him back this time, and he doesn’t look back.

;

Keith can’t get the simulator out of his head. He tries everything he can think of in the following weeks: he rides his bike, he works, he starts going for long runs out in the desert when the temperature allows. He doesn’t even like running, and would rather take his bike in any circumstance, but his bike reminds him of the simulator and then Keith finds himself thinking about the absolute freedom of space and then it all loops back around to the Galaxy Garrison. So he runs instead, as far as he can and then farther, until his legs sting with it and he’s the only thing in sight in the vast red of the desert. Keith imagines running so far into the shimmering horizon that he finally breaks free. 

Free of what is an entirely different question. Free of Earth’s gravity. Free of his own thoughts. Free of Galaxy Garrison. Free of the officer’s creased mouth and the contempt in his eyes. Free of the cadet’s face as Keith had left. If he runs far enough and fast then he could break free of his body altogether and for a moment be in the weightlessness of space. But in the end he’s still there in the desert, bent double, hands on his knees as he catches his breath. Keith hates running.

;

He gets put out of his misery more than a month after he’d gone in the simulator, and it’s unceremonious. A packet of recruitment and enlistment information appears in his mailbox. He’s been preselected for Galaxy Garrison. That isn’t a surprise at this point.

Normally, that’s how they trick you. You go to the Garrison open house, and they wow you with all their cool toys, and you give them your info and you enlist, and then you find out you didn’t make the cut for the Garrison. Keith’s made it over the first hurdle. Now he just has to fill out all of this stupid paperwork.

Name. Age. Date of birth. Address. Education. He has all these things. As for the things he doesn’t, those are the things that Galaxy Garrison believes you can do without. And he has done without for this long, so they’re probably right. Garrison runs on a schedule like a school, and it’s just now spring winding into summer, so Keith doesn’t bother with express mail.

He keeps working through the relentless heat of the summer, which dries up something inside of him as much as it does the surrounding landscape. His coworkers can read the writing on the wall well enough and they back off. Keith regrets it and doesn’t at the same time, and revels in the fact that soon he will be too busy for the luxury of sitting alone in the dusk with his feelings. 

He isn't busy yet, though, so he does spend a lot of time on porch thinking, when he can't bring himself to run. The overly enthusiastic brochures welcoming him to the Garrison included a list of “fun ways to prepare for your first semester at Galaxy Garrison.” Keith couldn't even make it past the title. That sort of stuff was meant for fresh-faced seventeen year olds who have been working most of their short lives for the chance to join the most revered branch of the military.

Keith is not a fresh-faced high school senior, if he ever was one. He graduated two years ago, but it feels like decades have passed since then. Time moves differently in the desert, but this is a separate warping of that delicate fabric.

Keith had been incandescently angry his last year of school. Angry at the universe in the way most teenagers are, of course, but underneath that was another fury, sharpened and waiting to be aimed. He'd been legally emancipated his junior year, and for every freedom it gave him, every weight lifted off his chest, there was some new, small humiliation lying in wait. People talked; other students didn't know what to make of him, so most just left him alone after a couple stilted attempts at conversation. Teachers and staff responded to him with varying degrees of pity and distaste. He didn't care then, doesn't care now, what they thought of him and his patched clothes, his free lunch and unwillingness to break eye contact in arguments.

He didn't care, but it wore him down. Sloped shoulder and curved back, but sharp angles in other unexpected places. He tried to fight, and when he fought he usually won, against would-be bullies who wildly underestimated his strength, or against teachers who found him rude and disruptive even when he wasn't trying to be. But it kept coming and kept coming, and finally Keith threw his hands up and committed to the waiting game. They couldn't stop him from graduating, not that they'd have wanted to in the first place.

He'd wanted, even back then, to go to the Galaxy Garrison, but he'd been smart enough to keep it to himself, especially after he missed their visit. The wanting back then wasn't like it is now, on the cusp of transforming into reality. Keith had wanted the whole nebulous life associated with the Garrison, because he thought it would give him a place to belong. He hadn't known anything about it then, except that you didn’t need a college degree and that they trained you to go to space.

He doesn't think of the Garrison as a place to belong, anymore, and he hasn't even gotten there. His disillusionment had come in the years after he graduated, but the look on the officer's face when Keith beat the sim course could have done the trick on its own.

When he gets there, he'll have to fight. That's fine. He's well-practiced already, and he knows now what he wants. He wants the rush of flight and the feeling of power and control he gets from piloting. He's too good for them to ignore him, and he wants to get even better. If he thinks, in a few quiet moments, about the way that cadet had looked at him as he left, and the way their fingers had brushed when Keith handed him the form, well, that's no one's business but his own. Soon, he won't have time for this kind of introspection. He can't wait.

The summer goes on, and so does he.

;

Keith arrives at the Garrison and is immediately lost in the sea of new recruits. It’s a relief to blend into the crowd; some of whom are loud and enthusiastic and surrounded by friends, some of whom are terrified and wide-eyed. Some, like Keith, seem content with where they are. 

The cadet that Keith met (in the broadest sense of the word) at the open house is here now, too. Keith can’t tell what he’s actually doing to stem the madness. You’d think that there would be more order at a military establishment. Maybe this is more orderly than the equivalent event somewhere else. Keith doesn’t know. 

The cadet spots him somehow, and he jumps a little in surprise. Keith didn’t expect to be recognized here. Maybe by the officer who’d put him through his paces, but not by the cadet. Why’s he here, anyway, Keith wonders to himself. Either he’s some sort of chronic do-gooder or he’s in trouble; those are the only reasons he can imagine for the cadet’s apparent interest in new recruits. Keith gets his dorm assignment and his schedule, and then he can slip away from the room, away from the sound of proud parents and nervous kids.

;

The cadet doesn’t pop up again for a week. Keith barely thinks about him, being as busy as he had predicted, except for when his distance from his peers is thrown into sharp relief, and then Keith wonders if the cadet thinks about him, if the cadet wants to be Keith’s friend and that’s why he reacted to Keith’s presence that first day. He could have been worse at the open house. He could have said something so easily, something designed to bring Keith back down to earth, to remind him of his place. But he didn’t. He had been – Keith can’t put on a finger on it but he had certainly been something and it hadn’t hurt. 

They do the flight tests at the end of their first week to determine placement. The engineering and comm kids go off to take a bunch of tests and fiddle with gadgets, while the pilot track students go into the solo simulator. Keith assumes its tougher than the one they bring to public events, so he goes back over the manuals he brought with him and mourns the fact that he doesn’t have access to his bike anymore. 

Instead it’s just like the one from the demo. Not an identical course but the same sort of thing. There’s a frame narrative to make it more real (or to unsettle them, Keith can’t decide) but he barely pays attention to that. 

When he steps out the instructor gives him a wary look, but then inspects his clipboard and says, “Oh, you’re the kid from the open house.”

Keith shrugs in assent and heads off. He can feel eyes on his back: the instructor’s, the other students’, and the cadet’s, too. He’s here, presumably helping in some way, which means he’s a chronic do-gooder and Keith needs to keep an eye out. 

An eye out _immediately_ , because the cadet follows him out of the room. Keith doesn’t bother trying to run; this guy is everywhere.

“Keith!”

He isn’t expecting to hear his name.

“Wait,” says the cadet, even though Keith has stopped and pressed his back against the wall. It’s not good for fleeing but it makes him more comfortable. The cadet is taller than Keith and more broad, but he doesn’t move with any kind of menace.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” he says as he comes to stop in front of Keith. “Oh, I guess I should introduce myself. I’m Shiro. Takashi Shirogane, but, uh, everyone calls me Shiro.”

He’s flustered, Keith realizes in a faint, far-off way. “I know.”

“You – what?”

“Everyone talks about you. You’re really good at everything and super nice. At least, that’s what they told us when we joined.”

“Who?’

“I have no idea. I heard people talking in the canteen about it, that’s all.”

“Oh.”

Keith doesn’t know if Shiro looks relieved or disappointed. There’s heat rising in his cheeks and he hates that, he hates that he’s been put on edge for no reason. Shiro seems nice – is nice based on all the evidence Keith has – but he’s canted his body towards Keith just a little and the corners of his mouth are upturned and his eyes are soft as they look into Keith’s, and it’s ruinous.

“I just wanted to introduce myself,” Shiro says.

“Oh.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. Someone else will be leaving the room soon, Keith is sure. He doesn’t know what to say; it’s rare that he’s at a loss for words. Usually he just doesn’t want to say anything, but he does, now, to put the tight line of Shiro’s shoulders at ease.

“I think you’re incredible,” Shiro blurts. 

Keith’s whole face is on fire now. It must be. He ducks his head but that doesn’t help at all. He just sees both of their feet, pointed towards one another.

“Sorry if that’s weird. But, no one’s ever done what you did.”

“Oh.” That’s what this is about. Keith knows that no one makes it in from the open houses, and he knows how people at Galaxy Garrison feel about the locals, so he knows how everyone here feels about him, the little desert rat who broke the unspoken rules. He starts to sidle out from under Shiro’s gaze.

“No one can fly like you,” Shiro says with a desperate tinge to his voice. “That’s what I meant.”

Keith must have shown more on his face than he intended. And now he is again, probably, because he can feel his jaw slacken and his eyes grow wide. 

Shiro is smiling at him, now, a full -fledged grin. It’s charming. It’s handsome. It brings into stark relief the strong, clean lines of his jaw. Keith never should have looked at him, that first time all those months ago. But he did, and he has a feeling he’s not going to stop any time soon.

The noise from the simulator room indicates that someone else has finished, so Shiro ducks his head and says “I’ll be seeing you,” and leaves Keith standing in the hallway, bewildered.

;

Everything’s fine until the results are posted. Keith keeps mostly to himself except when directly addressed. He tries, in those situations, but is content to spend his time alone. He has a lot to learn; they expect even the pilots to have a certain grasp of engineering and math and physics. There’s a gym, obviously, and it’s big enough that Keith doesn’t feel cramped or uncomfortable going. 

And then the results go out, a week after the tests. Keith can’t imagine why it takes them so long, but one of the comm kids tells everyone that they actually weigh a lot of factors, and something something something that Keith stops listening to. He isn’t nervous at all; the instructor wouldn’t have given him that pinched, suspicious look if Keith hadn’t managed an exceptional score.

He’s not surprised that he’s the top scorer, although the margin between him and second place is larger than he would have thought. _No wonder Shiro was so impressed_ , Keith thinks. Only the top third of pilot candidates make it into the fighter class. There are a lot of disappointed sighs around him. The tell-tale sniffing associated with unbidden tears, too. He should get out of here before someone decides to convert disappointment into anger.

Keith starts to slip out of the crowd; he thinks he can see Shiro in the corner of the canteen, watching the frenzy. Is he here to comfort those who didn’t make the fighter pilot cut? That seems like something he would do. He could be here to meet his new fellow pilots. He could be here just for Keith. That’s a nice thought, if kept secret.

He doesn’t make it away from the group, though. He hears someone shout his name, confused and angry, so he stops and turns around. 

It’s a boy who obviously got stuck in the cargo pilot group. His finger is still hovering near his own name; Keith can tell he’s near the top of that second group. “That’s seriously your score? You must have cheated.”

Keith doesn’t want to waste his time with this. Everyone is looking at him. “I didn’t.” Then, because that seems insufficient: “Sorry you didn’t make the cut.”

The guy is speechless with what must be rage, so Keith turns around and heads towards Shiro again. He can hear someone saying, “...open house...thought he was cheating then,” so it must be common knowledge, now, how he made it to the Garrison. If this is the price he pays for what he wants, then so be it. He's learned a new kind of patience out in the desert.

Shiro greets him with nothing more than a look of concern that makes Keith’s hackles rise. He’s by himself and Keith wonders for this first time if Shiro actually has any friends. 

A hand curves over his shoulder. “Congrats,” Shiro says. “I assume you were top of the class.”

Keith doesn’t know how to respond to that without sounding completely full of himself, so he nods without looking at Shiro. Shiro’s hand is large enough to cover all of the rounded muscle of Keith’s shoulder and then some, and his hand is warm, and it’s distracting. Keith leans into it. He can give as good as he gets. 

Shiro tenses but doesn’t pull away, to his credit. 

“Not everyone is as happy about it as you are.”

“That’s how it always is,” Shiro tells him. “My class was the same way.”

“Were you the top of your class?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that why you always,” Keith doesn’t know what he’s trying to ask, exactly. 

“Why I what?”

“Why you try so hard. Because people didn’t like that you were the best?”

They’re still touching; in fact, they’ve gotten closer to one another, so close that Keith can feel Shiro’s heat down his entire side, so Keith can feel Shiro go slack with surprise.

Keith pulls away, embarrassed. 

“I’m sorry,” he blurts. “That was out of line. I should go, anyway.”

He leaves before Shiro can respond.

;

Keith sees Shiro around after that, but never talks to him. He’s always in groups of older students, laughing and smiling, or helping some lost first year. He’s never alone, and Keith is always alone, and he doesn’t know how to bridge that gap. He sees no point in trying to go up and join Shiro; who would he be? What would he say to everyone else? He doesn’t have anything to say to them. He isn’t even sure what he wants to say to Shiro. He wants to apologize again, for what he said the day the rankings were released. If it had been the other way around Keith would have been bruised and furious, and he can’t imagine that Shiro isn’t at least a little upset.

Of course, Keith does have other things to do besides watch for Shiro out of the corners of his eyes. And he isn’t actually alone all of the time; he’s part of a team now, with an engineer and a comms expert. They’re near the top of their groups, too. Maybe they’re at the top; they hadn’t talked about it explicitly, just done their first run as a group and seen the results and then smiled at each other, slow and uncertain and hopeful. The three of them meet once a week outside of class, and they get along well enough, but they’re all too reserved to really connect the way some of the teams do. Keith hears whispers (from the cargo pilots, probably, he thinks) about how he’s not a team player, how that will be his undoing eventually. 

There are a million things that could undo him. Having two other people to help him fly isn’t one of them.

After a couple weeks of those whispers, he asks his team about it. The comms guy just shrugs and says, “I think we’re doing fine.” The engineer agrees, and she adds, “they’re probably just jealous. I heard the cargo pilots are like that every year, at least at the beginning.”

Keith tries to put it out of his mind, but it lingers, still. He isn’t like them, as much as he likes them. Both of his teammates are from cities far from the Garrison, both well-educated. Their parents came to drop them off. They told him that. He hadn’t told them anything, but silence in those situations is enough. He isn’t like them, and one day that will become a problem. 

;

Shiro comes to him, in the end. That’s what makes Keith think about it. Shiro finds him one evening, in the hour before the canteen opens for dinner but after classes are done for the day. Keith is in the gym, working out without any real plan. It’s better than the running he’d done over the summer to clear his head.

“I didn’t realize you were a gym rat,” Shiro says from the doorway.

Keith is so startled he almost drops the bar on his face. Shiro rushes to spot him.

“I’m not really,” Keith says once he’s sitting up. “But it clears my head, you know?”

Shiro nods.

“I’d normally just take my bike out, but I don’t have it here, so this is the next best thing.”

“Bike?”

“Hoverbike. You didn’t think I was this good without any practice, did you?”

Shiro blushes, which tells Keith everything he needs to know and more. He can’t help the smile that unfurls across his face.

“I bet you’re pretty good.”

“Not bad,” Keith admits. “I raced a lot. It’s good practice for the simulator. Or maybe the other way around, since you can’t die in the simulator.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Dying?”

Shiro lets out a startled laugh. “No, hoverbike racing.”

Keith shrugs and savors the feeling of well-worked muscles moving under his skin. “Could be? You know what they say about this town.”

“I don’t,” Shiro says in a way that means he knows exactly what Keith means.

“That it’s a lawless wasteland, you know, all of that. Maybe opinions have changed lately.”

“I don’t think that.”

“I know.”

Shiro comes to sit next to him on the bench, closer than is strictly necessary. Keith wonders if Shiro’s aware of it, how he leans towards Keith, how he almost seems to orbit him. Not that Keith has a lot of data to work with, but even when he’s seen Shiro in passing he feels as though Shiro strains towards him like a dog on a too-short leash. He wonders if Shiro knows there’s no leash, and no one holding it.

From there it’s natural to look at Shiro’s throat, where Keith can see his pulse moving steady down into the soft hollow between his collarbones. Shiro has to know that Keith is staring, but he’s holding himself so still, so careful. Keith drags his eyes up to Shiro’s face; Shiro’s eyelids are at half-mast already.

Something uncurls inside Keith’s chest, and he leans forward to press his lips to Shiro’s. Shiro kisses back, with one of his hands fluttering by Keith’s jaw, until he stops short, reeled in again by the leash.

“Oh,” Shiro says. He won’t meet Keith’s eyes but his fingertips are resting against his lips.

“Did you not...”

“No, no,” Shiro says quickly. “I did. I do.”

“Okay.”

Keith doesn’t know where to go from here. 

Shiro clearly does, though: away.

“I’m sorry,” he says, audibly flustered. “I’m not upset, I just need to go.” And then he bolts with a surprising degree of dignity. 

Keith watches him go, and then reracks his weights. He’s never felt so alone in an empty room.

;

Over the next few weeks Keith doesn’t see much of Shiro in spite of his best efforts. Shiro is as omnipresent as he always is, and yet he feels miles away from Keith. He no longer looks towards him, or tries to get Keith to join him in conversations that Keith doesn’t even want to be a part of. Keith still doesn’t want to get stuck talking to a bunch of older students about shuttle specs or theoretical physics, but he does want Shiro to want him to be there. But Shiro obviously needs time to process what happened-what Keith had revealed to him-and Keith can’t bring himself to interfere with that.

Instead, he begrudgingly agrees to spend time with his teammates. They seem to like him well enough, especially compared to the pilots. They study together twice a week, now, and Keith gives them pointers for self-defense. It’s his favorite class and their least favorite.

“That’s because you’re both nerds,” Keith tells them after he’s tried to teach them how to fall properly.

“But you’re not,” says Priya, the engineer.

“No,” Keith says. “I’m not a nerd.”

“No comment,” the comms guy says. 

Keith glares but doesn’t argue. He’s not a nerd, even if he likes reading equipment manuals, or whatever else they were going to offer as evidence. They fall into a comfortable silence as they do the history reading.

“Hey,” the comms guy, Alex says. Both Keith and Priya look up. “Did you guys know that the last time we sent anything out to Kerberos was in like, 2025?”

“Yeah, we’re all reading the same thing.”

Alex pouts. “Well, did you guys know that Kerberos is where the Mission is going?”

Keith can hear the capital letters in Mission. Everyone says it like that, because it’s so mysterious and obviously important. Garrison is gearing up for its first manned spaceflight in years and it’s shrouded in secrecy. 

“How’d you find that out?” Priya asks.

“I just have connections,” Alex preens. 

Keith levels a stare at him.

“Fine, fine. Commander Holt’s son-Matt-tutors me in physics sometimes. He told me. I’m not supposed to tell anyone but he probably wasn’t either.”

Priya raises an eyebrow but, shockingly, doesn’t say anything.

“Shirogane’s probably going to be the pilot,” says Alex. “He’s got seniority and he’s the best anyway.”

“Keith’s the best.”

Keith blinks at her.

“You are,” she tells him with a shrug. “Besides, everyone always talks about how the greenies are terrible at everything. But they’re wrong, and you’re indisputable proof. Even Shirogane can’t beat your scores, I bet.”

Keith can feel his face heating up. “I don’t think Shiro cares that much. He’s never seemed jealous.”

“You know Shirogane?” Priya asks.

“You’re friends with Shirogane?” Alex yells at the same time. Keith winces.

“I,” he pauses. “We’ve met. We’ve hung out a little.” Great, that sounds super normal and chill. “He was at the open house where they recruited me, and I guess he remembered who I was.”

“So it’s true?” Alex asks. Priya shoots him a glare.

“What’s true?”

“That you just walked into the simulator and blew all the records out of the water? That it was at an open house? You’re like, legendary, bro.”

As he talks, Priya’s glare intensifies and Keith’s jaw grows tighter and tighter. 

“Who told you that?”

“Uh, the Holt kid, I think. Most of the upperclassmen know. Maybe Shirogane told them.”

Shiro would have, too, and he wouldn’t have done it out of anything but pride. In the few months of their acquaintanceship (friendship, maybe) Keith has only ever had the sense that Shiro is amazed by him and wants him to have what Shiro has: that easy way of carrying himself with others, and his popularity, and all the respect that comes with that. He doesn’t understand—not that Keith has done anything to explain it to him—that Keith didn’t want any of that. He wants to keep his head down and fly until he can’t anymore. He wants to be able to sit here with his teammates and do his homework and have them know just as much about him as he’s willing to share. He doesn’t want everyone in the Garrison knowing his business. 

He wants to fly and he wants to be alone when he wants, and he wants Shiro. He doesn’t know if he can have all these things at once, if he’s even allowed to have any of them at all.

“You okay?” Priya asks. “Alex is an idiot.”

“Yeah, I’m okay. I didn’t realize everyone knew about me, that’s all.”

“Right, sorry,” Alex mutters.

“Do you think they’d consider you for the Kerberos mission, though?” Priya asks.

“No one’s even mentioned it to me,” Keith says with a shrug. He doesn’t look up at either of them. “So I doubt it.”

“Well, I don’t think anyone’s supposed to know about it. Matt definitely wasn’t supposed to tell me, and he only knows because his dad told him, and his dad only knows because he’s the head science officer.”

“You should keep your ears open,” Priya tells him. 

“Sure,” Keith answers, dry.

;

Nothing comes up about the Kerberos mission. Keith isn’t surprised. The instructors don’t fawn over him the way that people seem to expect. Even his teammates have this belief that he gets some sort special treatment when no one else is watching, but Keith never lingers around long enough for anyone to pull him into a one-on-one. He gets the feeling that some of the instructors want to. They're all curious about him, even if they manage to keep it under wraps better than their students do.

He wants to talk to Shiro about it, but Shiro is still giving him a wide berth. They’ve upgraded to smiling at each other when they pass in the canteen, and Shiro says hello to him, too, now, with a smile that he tries to fight down but can’t, and which crinkles the corner of his eyes in a way that makes Keith’s organs melt.

Shiro would tell him if Keith asked. Keith wants to ask, but he wants Shiro to come to him. (If he’s being honest, and he tries to be with himself, he thought Shiro meant that he needed a couple of days at most. Not weeks and weeks.) Keith thinks about him sometimes (all the time), about his soft lips under Keith’s and his big warm hands anywhere, everywhere. 

One day Keith passes Shiro in the hallway as he’s talking to some of his friends. It’s lunch hour, and Keith is taking his time on his way to the canteen. Three times a week he has lunch with his teammates, and this is not one of those days. He could go and sit with them anyway and they wouldn’t mind, but their friends aren’t his friends and Keith doesn’t want to eat with people who aren’t his friends. 

“Keith!” Shiro calls out, and Keith stops dead in his tracks. “C’mere.”

So he does. Shiro’s eyes widen in shock before he reels Keith in with a hand on his wrist. His hands are indeed as big as Keith remembered them, which is good news for Keith’s mental stability. 

Shiro introduces him to the upperclassmen but Keith can’t focus long enough to remember their names. They all seem to know who he is, anyway. (“Shiro told us you were incredible!”)

“In the simulator,” Shiro adds in a rush, as though his friends would have had any other interpretation of that. Maybe the could have. Maybe Shiro had told them what happened in the weight room that night, and now they’re all looking at him and thinking about how he took his shot with the most popular student in the Garrison and failed.

But Shiro’s face is red like Keith’s feels, so probably not. Everyone pretends that Shiro didn’t say that, and the upperclassmen gamely ask Keith questions about how he’s settling in, what his favorite class is, how he’s so good at flying. Eventually they get tired of Keith’s lukewarm answers: fine, self-defense, practice and good reflexes, and head to the canteen, leaving Keith and Shiro behind them to avoid eye contact with one another.

“I’m surprised you came over,” Shiro says.

“Me too.”

“I’m sorry, you know. I’ve been avoiding you.” 

Keith would like to tell him that it’s fine, but he can’t bring himself to. Shiro would probably sniff out the lie anyway, because Keith is not particularly good at direct lying.

“I just haven’t been able to decide what to do.”

He’s going to turn Keith down, and Keith didn’t even ask him anything, really. He’d kissed Shiro because he saw the way that Shiro looked at him, and Shiro was kind and attractive and appealing to Keith on a fundamental level. 

Keith knows he looks miserable; he’s not looking at Shiro and the corners of his mouth are tight and drawn down, and his shoulder are hunched even as he tells himself to stand straight. 

“Hey.” Shiro’s hand is suddenly on his cheek. “Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” Keith mumbles. He still isn’t going to look up.

“Okay, okay. I’m just trying to tell you I do like you. A lot.”

Keith snaps his head up at that. Shiro is blushing hard, but he’s looking right at Keith, and his hand is a soft, insistent pressure.

“But you don’t know what to do.”

“I’m sorry.”

Keith glares. He glares, but he understands what Shiro is trying to tell him, even if Shiro himself doesn’t realize that he’s saying it. Keith remembers his world wrenching off its axis years ago as an answer to a question he hadn’t been asking, and he had been no one; not bullied, not mocked, but certainly not what Shiro is in the Garrison. He’d been able to sit with himself for as long as he’d needed—not long, because Keith has always sat well in his own skin—and be left alone. Shiro can’t do that without drawing attention to himself.

“It’s okay,” Keith says, and reaches to cover Shiro’s hand with his and then to guide it away from his face.

“I want to make a decision,” Shiro tells him. He doesn’t let go of Keith’s hand. Instead, he tangles their fingers together.

“Okay. Okay.”

“I’m going to stop avoiding you, though, no matter what.”

Those last three words make Keith’s stomach clench, but he nods and smiles anyway. He doesn’t know what to say. They are still holding hands, and Shiro’s thumb is sweeping over Keith’s knuckles. They are in the hallway, where anyone could see them, and even if it is already a quarter into the lunch hour that doesn’t that mean that there aren’t other stragglers.

Keith starts to pull away, but Shiro doesn’t let him. 

“I don’t care if people see,” Shiro says and Keith ducks his head, embarrassed, “that’s not what this is about.”

 _Then what is it_ , Keith wants to ask. 

Instead he says, “Okay,” again, like some kind of idiot. 

Then Shiro drops his hand. “Okay,” he echoes.

“I’ll, uh, see you around, then,” Keith blurts, and powerwalks towards the canteen without checking to see if Shiro is following.

;

Keith feels like an idiot after his conversation with Shiro, and starts not exactly avoiding Shiro but simply finding reasons not to be in public places, especially when he knows Shiro might be there. He even stops going to the gym for a while, in case Shiro thinks to go there to look for him. Instead he finds a way onto the roof and goes there when he needs to clear his head at night. He hopes that Shiro is too naturally rule-abiding to have any idea that this place is even accessible.

Of course, the universe loves to laugh at plans, and especially at Keith’s plans. Shiro finds him one night when Keith is there just to look at the stars and let his mind drift. The air in the desert gets cold at night and Keith privately believes that it makes the stars brighter, though he has nothing to compare it to. 

Shiro sits down next to him and draws his knees in close, but doesn’t say a word. Keith shifts his body towards Shiro, but keeps his eyes on the sky. He knows that Shiro is doing the same, even if he can't see it. He’s been running away like a child, and now he’s been found. He doesn’t feel cornered, though, like he would expect to. Instead Keith feels a sort of relief. He doesn’t want to pour all of his time and energy into tiptoeing around Shiro and his feelings about Shiro and Shiro’s feelings about him. He’d rather just—well, Keith doesn’t know what he’d rather, but then, who does?

“Now you’re avoiding me,” Shiro says, rebuke soft in his voice.

“Yeah,” Keith admits, “guess it’s my turn to apologize.”

“I didn’t know there was a way up to the roof,” Shiro tells him.

That makes Keith smile. “I’d sort of figured. How’d you find it?”

“Process of elimination, basically. I tried everywhere else and then someone pointed out that I hadn’t tried the roof.”

“So everyone knows about the roof except you?”

“No,” Shiro says, “everyone knows about the roof, including me.”

“Right, right.” Keith lets it go. “How come I’ve never run into anyone else up here?”

“No idea,” Shiro admits. “I think it’s probably just too cold right now. Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Not really,” Keith shrugs. “I run pretty hot. Plus, I grew up here, so I’m used to it.”

“You grew up here?”

Keith finally turns to look at Shiro. “Obviously. Why else did you think I was at that open recruitment?”

Shiro, who is still not looking at Keith, shrugs. “People come from pretty far away for those things. At least that’s what they tell us.”

“Well, not me. I’m just a desert rat.”

“I don’t think of you that way.”

“Why not?” Keith asks, with more venom in his words than he’d intended. “It’s what I am. I’m from here. I wasn’t born here but I grew up here. It’s what I know.”

The look Shiro gives him is reproving, if gentle. “We both know what people mean when they say desert rat, Keith.”

True. They both do. He’s baiting Shiro. “I don’t want everyone to be talking about me. I don’t want to. I don’t know. I just came here to learn how to pilot. That’s it.”

Shiro turns to him now with a wry smile. “That’s what I wanted, too, but that’s not how it works. You can’t just disappear when you’re not in class.”

His voice is too fond for someone who’s known Keith for so little time. Keith wants to drown in it as much as he wants to shove Shiro off of the roof for it. 

“I can still want it, though.”

“Well, that’s true. I can’t stop you from wanting it.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

That startles a laugh out of Shiro. “I guess it depends on what you want me to do about it.”

Keith likes Shiro, but he doesn’t have the patience for this kind of back-and-forth bullshit, even if it's cute in theory. He never has. Shiro looks more relaxed than he has been the last couple of times they were alone together. This time, Keith telegraphs his movements even more obviously.

He’s rewarded handsomely; Shiro leans down as Keith leans up, and there’s nothing holding him back this time.

Shiro’s warm, soft mouth opens for Keith, but it’s not until Shiro twists his body and moves around Keith so that they’re at a less awkward angle that Keith realizes that he’s not going to run away. Shiro’s facing Keith now, sitting right in front of him, and his hands are curled around Keith’s elbows so soft and tentative that it’s clear how much he wants to put them somewhere else. He’s not going anywhere.

Keith lets his focus narrow down to the spots where their bodies are touching. The mouth sounds coming from both of them would drive him up the wall, except that he can’t separate them from the rest of the sensations: the warmth and wetness of Shiro’s mouth, and the calluses on his hands that Keith can feel through the thin fabric of his jacket, and the way Shiro smells, like the standard-issue soap, and sweat, and boy.

They give in to gravity; Shiro’s weight presses down on Keith, who flattens himself back against the concrete of the roof, shoulder blades drawn closer together and hips raised slightly to keep the knobs of his spine from bearing the brunt of Shiro’s weight. This has the added bonus of bringing their bodies flush against one another, so close that Keith thinks he can shove his heat under Shiro’s skin. Now more than ever he feels as though his skin has been set alight, and the only solution he can see is to get closer and closer to Shiro.

Shiro’s mouth slides to his neck, where he kisses softly above Keith’s pulse point. Keith wraps a leg around Shiro’s waist in an attempt to close what little space remains between them. Keith’s erection rubs against Shiro’s, and the thrill of the friction makes his leg tighten harder around Shiro.

Shiro stutters against Keith’s grasp and pulls back enough to look Keith in the eyes. His expression is glazed and his lips are red and shiny. Honestly, Keith thinks he could die happy now.

“Do you?” He starts to ask. Shiro hasn’t moved further away, but he hasn’t come any closer. Keith’s skin tingles with the loss of him.

Whatever Shiro sees in Keith’s face must be enough, which is good; Keith doesn’t know that he could force out any more words. Shiro smiles at him and leans back down and that’s when Keith gives himself permission to stop thinking all together.

They don’t last long, rutting frantically against each other, hands grasping onto whatever bit of skin they can find. Shiro comes first, hard and fast, and Keith wrenches his eyes open a second too late to see Shiro’s face when he does. Keith comes soon after, with Shiro’s hand only just between his pants and his boxers, his initiative taken too late to have any real effect.

Shiro rolls off of him and Keith is still relaxed enough to make an unsatisfied noise and the loss of Shiro’s warm weight.

Shiro grins at him in wordless apology and tugs on Keith’s wrist to pull him against his side. Keith bites at his shoulder through the cloth.

“Weird,” Shiro murmurs.

“Don’t let me fall asleep up here,” Keith says in response.

;

Keith falls asleep on the roof that night anyway. It’s the first time, but far from the last. Sometimes he goes up alone to watch the stars and give himself space to breath, and ends up drowsing until the rising sun wakes him and he has to scramble to get ready for class. The rest of the time he comes with Shiro, who never seems to succumb to the same post-coital slumber that snags Keith nearly every time. At least that means that they’re never late to morning classes, disheveled and bruised and still smelling of sex. There aren’t explicit rules about fraternization, as far as Keith knows (which is admittedly not very far since he hasn’t bothered to read beyond the introduction to the code of conduct) but there are definitely rules about hanging out on the roof all night.

Shiro would probably be able to get away with it, if he was on his own. The golden child just trying to get some peace and quiet after a long day of exceeding everyone’s expectations. Keith wishes he would, sometimes, because he doesn’t understand how Shiro can do it day after day: top in his classes, a constant friendly presence, tutoring younger cadets. He’s going to get to pilot the mission everyone’s whispering about, and Keith couldn’t be happier. Maybe then Shiro will get a chance to rest.

Keith thinks about this more than he would like to. He already thinks about Shiro what feels like every damn minute of his life, except for when he’s flying. That’s—probably normal enough for his age and situation.

Keith only starts fixating on it because he’s exhausted, too. Even though no official statement on the upcoming mission has been made, the instructors have been very obviously giving more work to a few dozen students across all of the tracks. Keith’s one of them, and so is Shiro, and several other pilots that Keith doesn’t know because they’re not first-years.

His teammates have been good about it. Better than he’d feared. They haven’t made the cut, but then, Keith’s the only first year in any track who did. He’d expected cold jealousy, like the kind he gets from some of the upperclassmen, or the constant angry blustering that some of the cargo pilots still spout at him. But instead they’re happy for him, and they help him stay on top of his coursework, and in return he spars with them.

It’s only when he’s alone that he really feels comfortable. Alone, and when he’s with Shiro. He’s never felt this way before about another person, but with Shiro Keith feels like he doesn’t have to try at all. He’s just himself, and Shiro lets him be that way.

He wants Shiro to feel the same way, but he doesn’t know how to do it. Keith has never been good at putting people at ease (although that could be from lack of practice) and Shiro is so naturally good at it that Keith rarely realizes what’s happened until he and Shiro have had to go their separate ways. He tries to put it out of his mind but it always comes back around somehow: a little hitch in Shiro’s smile, the fact that he never really falls asleep on the roof, his uncharacteristic silences.

One weekend, Keith finally gets his chance. Shiro’s roommate has gone to his parents for the long holiday weekend, one of the rare privileges of the upperclassmen, and Keith basically moves in. He’d made sure not to invite himself, but as soon as Shiro saw him in the hallway that Friday, he pulled him aside with a conspiratorial grin on his face.

“My roommate's gonna be gone this weekend.”

“I’ll see you after dinner, then,” Keith had told him, and the way that Shiro had ducked his head to hide his answering smile told him all he needed to know about Shiro’s feelings on the matter.

That night Keith had fully intended on sleeping in his own room; he hadn’t even brought anything with him when he showed up at Shiro’s room. At best he'd been hoping to have sex on an actual bed. He tried to seem as normal as possible, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he waited for Shiro to let him in. It didn’t take long in reality, but it felt like a damn decade to Keith. And even though everyone who’s anyone (or anyone who as any sense of situational awareness) already knews that Keith and Shiro were together, Keith was still keeping an eye out for someone who might rat them out. There were probably rules against staying in someone else’s room overnight. Although, again, that wasn’t his agenda.

But he’d fallen asleep anyway, curled up against Shiro in his bunk.

When he woke up the next morning Shiro was still asleep, a total dead weight draped across Keith’s chest, and Keith decided that there was nothing worth moving. He’d never seen Shiro this calm and relaxed before. He looked younger, like it’s his first year too.

Keith fell back asleep and woke up to see Shiro blinking awake next to him, and decided that nothing was worth moving.

;

So that’s how Keith finds himself Sunday morning, watching Shiro sleep again. He plays with Shiro’s tablet—he got the login info from Shiro yesterday to check his assignments— and debates going to the canteen for breakfast. As some sort of relic from decades and decades ago, the Sunday late breakfast-early lunch menu is by the far best and most expansive, which isn’t all that impressive considering the normal fare. But it is fresh fruit day, and Keith knows that Shiro misses fruit probably most of all, so he levers himself out of bed, careful not to wake Shiro, and creeps down to the cantina.

It’s early yet, and the air is still cold. The smell coming from the kitchens is warm, though, and it feels for those few minutes that he’s somewhere other than the Garrison, somewhere sweet and private. That feeling lasts until Keith makes it to the canteen itself, which always has a faint smell of sweat and yesterday's food. There are other people already at the tables, mostly older students or staff, and they don’t even turn to look at Keith, because the instructors don’t really care what anyone’s doing unless ignoring it will get them in trouble. The older students also ignore him; he’s not a big deal to them the way he is to the other underclassmen.

The ladies working the counter like him almost as much as they like Shiro, who they like more than anyone else in the entire Garrison. Keith doesn’t have Shiro’s charisma but most of the service staff here are locals, and so they’re the only people outside of Shiro that Keith feels comfortable with. So they like him enough to give him food for two in a little to-go box that normally only the faculty and staff have access to. And three servings of fruit instead of two.

Keith has a private smile tucked under his chin all the way back to Shiro’s room. He uses Shiro’s extra key to get in (jokingly nabbed from Shiro’s drawer yesterday, which Shiro saw, which made him turn bright red and admit he wanted Keith to have it).

Shiro is sitting on his bed, his head between his hands. Keith has to clear his throat to get his attention, and when Shiro looks up Keith is shocked. He looks tired, not sleepy, and worried, tense. There are fine lines visible at the corners of his eyes that aren’t there when he’s sleeping. His whole expression morphs when he sees Keith with breakfast; he must have thought he’d been abandoned.

Keith puts the food on Shiro’s desk and goes to the bed. Before Shiro can fully stand up, Keith presses him back down with a hand on his shoulder.

“Did you think I left?”

“Ah.”

Keith doesn’t need Shiro to say any more than that. “Where would I go?” he asks as he sits down next to him.

“I know you wouldn’t go anywhere.” Shiro says, as though he believes there are actually places Keith would go from here, as though Keith has anywhere he’d rather be.

He chokes, though, on those words. Keith has never wanted to say something like that to anyone. And Shiro already seems shaken up (although by what Keith still can’t quite understand). He doesn’t want to push things too far.

Shiro does get up then, to bring the food over to his bed even though Keith can distinctly remember him whining about crumbs in his sheets multiple times. Keith watches him move, graceful and composed even in the morning, the lines of muscle in his back highlighted as he leans forward to pick up the plates.

Shiro blushes once he realizes that Keith is staring at him, but he doesn’t move his eyes from Keith’s, or put a shirt on, so Keith keeps looking.

He does insist that they eat sitting on the edge of the bed, which Keith tells him is dumb and uncomfortable; the whole point of eating in bed is the lying down and relaxing part. They might as well be at the desk, trying to sit in the same chair before one of them gives up and perches on the desk.

“It’s a process,” Shiro insists.

“So next time, you’ll let us make a mess?”

Keith doesn’t intend for that to sound as filthy as it does.

“I think I’d like that,” Shiro says, a flush still high on his cheeks. The tone of his voice makes something low in Keith’s stomach twist into knots. He is no longer particularly interested in eating.  
Shiro, of course, cleans his plate with no sign that he’s thinking about anything except breakfast, but when he turns to Keith it’s there on his face plain as day, and he lets Keith pull him back down onto the bed.

;

In the afterglow, Keith lifts his head up from Shiro’s chest. Shiro’s propped against his pillows, reading something on his tablet. Keith can feel the thin line of tension in his body, which isn’t a trembling nervousness but just a need to hold himself in place. Keith doesn’t think that there’s somewhere else that Shiro wants to be, necessarily, but that maybe this just isn’t where he wants to be, pressed under Keith’s weight, skin on skin.

There is an uptick at the corner of Shiro’s mouth that makes him hopeful, though.

“Is this okay?” He asks. It’s a woefully inadequate expression of what he’s thinking. That’s always been Keith’s problem. That he can’t put into words what he’s feeling, all the whirling complexity of it. He can only hope that Shiro understands.

“Of course it is!” Shiro says. He puts the tablet down so he can look Keith in the face. “It’s more than okay.”

“Oh, good.” Keith can feel himself blush, so he looks at the dip between Shiro’s collarbones instead of in his eyes.

“You just seem, I don’t know, nervous a lot of the time. With me. I don’t wanna make you uncomfortable with all this.”

That does make Shiro nervous, so Keith sits up and away from him, hoping the distance will help calm him down.

“I’m not uncomfortable,” Shiro admits. “I’ve just never done this before.”

 _This_ could mean anything: have sex with a man, be in a relationship with a man, be in a relationship at all, have sex at all. Not like Keith is an expert in any of those arenas, but it hadn’t ever occurred to him that Shiro really has no idea what he’s doing. Shiro projects competence in so many areas of his life that Keith had just assumed that extended to everything. Apparently he was wrong.

“Oh,” is what he says to express all of that. “I don’t really know what I’m doing, either.”

Shiro’s expression lightens at that, and he tugs Keith towards him so that they’re once again flush against each other.

 _This is good_ , Keith thinks. _I want this to stay_.

;

To say that things continued normally makes it sound like Keith’s life has always been this way. It isn’t that a weight has been lifted from him—all of that moves forward with him—but that suddenly there’s something else, too. Not a helping hand but a welcome distraction. Keith doesn’t like to think of himself as being burdened with anything. Burdens can be set down, or handed over. Burdens only have value as long as you give value to them. That was something he’d heard from a school counselor and had definitely taken the wrong message away from. He wasn’t carrying anything, he’d decided then. He’s just heavy, as a person. Sometimes it feels almost literal, like Earth’s gravity is too much for him. All of the things that weigh him down, all that loss, it isn’t something that the universe dropped on him, or something he was handed by fate. It’s baked into his bones, and there’s no way to outrun it.

It’s easier to forget at the Garrison, though. He’s busy all the time and especially now, because the rumored mission to Pluto’s moon isn’t just a rumor anymore. Keith heard from Shiro, who had heard from one of the staff members who’d overheard a phonecall in Iverson’s office that the money came through. They haven’t made any official announcements yet, but suddenly all the simulator classes have gotten harder, even for the first years who obviously aren’t in the running.

“You probably are,” Shiro tells Keith when he’s complaining. “Besides, I thought you were bored, before.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s the principle of the thing.”

“You are a principled person,” Shiro says in a way that Keith would take as a joke coming from anyone else.

They grow quiet for a while.

Then: “I really think you are in the running.”

“We’ll see.”

;

And see they do. A month later—just before the end of the school year—the announcement is made, and the Garrison goes wild. Everyone wants to stay for the summer, which is normally an honor reserved for the top students and a few overeager nerds. The brass have anticipated this, though, and two hours later a list of students permitted to remain is released. Keith and his team are the only first years.

He isn’t surprised. Instead, Keith is uncomfortable. His teammates are shocked and excited even though “it’s gonna be weird being the only firsties around.” They run to call their families and let them know, and Keith wonders what kind of reaction the news will elicit. He imagines happiness at the honor and sadness at the long separation. He thinks about going and pretending to call someone, but it’s no secret anymore that there’s no one waiting for Keith at home.

Shiro is waiting for him after his last class of the day, though. And that is so much better than Keith ever thought he would get.

“I told you!” Shiro crows delightedly.

Keith graciously submits to Shiro’s loving harassment. He’s obviously staying too; is, in fact, the clear forerunner in the race to be the mission pilot.

“You know,” Shiro says later, leaning against Keith in his bed, “the rules are much more relaxed over the summer. We could probably room together.”

Keith freezes up so completely that he knows that Shiro must have felt it, and he gets his confirmation when Shiro gently pulls away.

“We don’t have to,” Shiro is saying, “I don’t know if it’s too soon or anything, I just thought I’d mention it. Everyone knows we’re close anyway, so it wouldn’t be weird.”

Keith is only barely listening, though. He doesn’t know why Shiro is nervous and apologizing for giving Keith something he wants. It’s endearing when it doesn’t make Keith want to shrivel up and die. Right now, he’s leaning towards the latter. If he’s got so many and strong walls up that his boyfriend of several months can’t even tell how much Keith likes him, then things are probably doomed and Keith will be alone, again. The same heavy bones, the same weight as always.

Shiro deserves better than this. Better than this awkward silence and more awkward distance, but Keith doesn’t know how to be better, even if he desperately wants to be.

“Keith?”

“Hm?”

Shiro waves a hand in front of his face, close again. “You completely spaced out there.” His nervousness seems to have evaporated in the face of Keith’s weirdness.

“Sorry, I-” he doesn’t actually know what to apologize for in the face of Shiro’s crooked smile. “Yeah, we should room together. I’d like that.”

“Great. I’ll figure it out tomorrow. Will your friends care?”

Keith bites back a comment about having no friends; Shiro must mean his teammates. “Nah. We spend enough time together as it is. Plus they definitely know we’re dating anyway.”

“You told them?”

“No, they figured it out somehow.”

“But we’ve been so subtle about it.”

Keith is pretty sure Shiro is joking, but he thinks they have actually been pretty subdued about it, at least compared to what Keith has learned from observing others. They could touch more in public, maybe. Keith has never been a particularly demonstrative person but he likes being close to Shiro, and he doesn’t mind the idea of people knowing that.

But then he’d have to talk about it, and Iverson would probably weigh in, and Keith is always on the verge of kicking Iverson’s ass anyway.

“Things are okay the way they are,” he decides out loud. Shiro frowns in confusion, but agrees anyway.

;

Summer rushes into existence before Keith can recover from final exams. He’d done well enough, still the best pilot and a great fighter and a good enough student in every other class that the cargo pilot with the loud mouth, whose name Keith has actively refused to learn, harangues him about it in the canteen in front of everyone.

He doesn’t have to defend himself, though, because everyone knows it’s just jealousy. He eats quickly and leaves before things get out of hand.

And then everyone is gone except for the potentials. No one knows if they’re going to be picking the best team or just the best individuals, and it makes everyone crazy from the get-go.

“You don’t have to worry about it,” Priya complains. “You’re the best pilot anyway.”

“I’m not,” Keith argues, but it’s routine at this point. “Besides, they obviously want teams; Masha and Terry are almost as good as you guys, but they didn’t make it.”

“I can’t tell if that was a compliment or not,” Alex muses.

“Gift horses,” Priya says.

It goes like that, day in day out, for the entire summer. No one actually gets kicked out of the program, but by the time the heat has run its course into September and the Garrison is full with new and returning students, it’s clear that a decision has been made but kept secret to spare feelings. Everyone knows that it’s going to be Shiro, though, and he’s the one person no one can hold a grudge against. He’s been at the top of every class, basically, and he’s been meeting with Commander Holt, who’s already been announced as the commanding officer slash chief scientist for the mission.

They make the announcement in late October. Shiro is ecstatic and Keith, too. He’d worried that he’d be jealous, but he isn’t. There will be other missions after the success of this one (Keith has no doubt that they will succeed). Other missions, bigger ships, further stars. That’s what he tells Shiro when Shiro asks, the tremble of joy in his voice even as he expresses concern for Keith.

“You’ll come see me off? It’s in just a few weeks,” Shiro asks.

It’s been on Keith’s calendar since the launch date was announced. Shiro knows this, but he’s still asking and it makes Keith’s heart swell in a strange way. No one’s ever asked him something like this before.

“Of course, of course, idiot,” Keith mutters against his chest.

;

Three weeks. There’s a countdown on Shiro’s computer and on Keith’s and in the canteen. It’s all anyone talks about even though you’d think everyone’d be sick of it by now. Keith’s almost sick of hearing about it, and not just because the thought of Shiro being gone for so long is a dull twisting ache that Keith hasn’t felt in a long time.

Two weeks and three days. There’s a sudden hush that’s crept over the Garrison—the press releases about the mission have stopped. The countdown marches on, Shiro and the Holts continue preparing, but Keith feels something on the horizon. He doesn’t ask Shiro if he feels it too, because he doesn’t want to ruin this for Shiro. Shiro wants the stars as much as Keith does.

Twelve days and Keith and Shiro are lurking outside of Iverson’s office, where an important-sounding meeting is taking place. Everyone’s voices are hushed, so Shiro motions for them to get closer. Keith gives him an incredulous look; Shiro’s delinquency doesn’t extend this far, Keith though. Shiro in return gives him a wicked smile that makes Keith’s toes curl. They inch forward.

“--miss this?” Keith hears in a voice he doesn’t recognize.

“It came out of nowhere.” That’s Commander Holt’s voice. This is about the Kerberos mission for sure.

“How?” A third person hisses.

“This is the sort of thing you’re supposed to be able to predict,” the first voice says.

He and Shiro exchange wide-eyed looks.

Iverson speaks next: “Scrap it or not?” His tone suggests that this has not been the first time he’s had to ask the question.

“If we pull out now we’re never going to get the support for another go.”

“If we rush into this and fail, we will actually never get funding again.”

“If we admit we couldn’t anticipate what look like a fucking meteor shower out by Pluto, Christ knows what it actually is, we will actively lose funding.”

“The question we need to ask first,” says a new voice, “is if anyone could actually fly through this mess.”

“Shirogane can,” Commander Holt says.

“We haven’t run any sims even close to this,” Iverson replies, “so we can’t say that with confidence.”

“Only Shirogane?”

“Maybe another.”

Shiro looks at Keith and mouths, “you.”

“No duh,” Keith hisses back.

“Can you make a sim course in time?”

“We can use what we’ve actually recorded in the area,” Holt says, voice wary.

“Do it. Do it fast. We’ll make our decision based on the results.”

There’s a grumble of assent that probably marks the end of the meeting. Keith and Shiro scuttle to the next hallway over, where they stare at each other in shock.

“Holy shit,” Shiro whispers. “Holy shit.”

He sounds almost excited at the idea of having to fly through an asteroid field, and to have to compete against Keith for the opportunity to do so.

Truth be told, Keith is excited too, at the prospect of racing through a new obstacle course, and the chance to go head to head against Shiro. He wishes there weren’t so much at stake, so much that he could take from Shiro.

“I’m not going to hold back,” Keith warns.

“Wouldn’t be you if you did,” Shiro says, suffused with affection. There are words layered below what he actually says, but Keith can’t bear to uncover them. Instead he stands there, mute, unable to think of what to say in response.

Eleven days. Keith and Shiro and a couple of pilots Keith doesn’t know, and who are probably just there so that it’s not as obvious what’s going on, head to the simulators.

It’s a grueling course. Keith clears it by the skin of his teeth and stumbles out of the sim drenched in sweat to discover that he’s the only one who made it through. He can’t bring himself to look at Shiro.

Nine days. The official announcement is made. Keith meets the Holts, who are unfailingly polite even though Keith is pretty sure they’d both prefer Shiro. Iverson rattles off instructions at him during a meeting to long to really be called a briefing. Keith tactfully doesn’t mention that he already knows most of this because Shiro told him.

Keith clears his physical, but the doctor sideyes him. “You always run this hot,” she says. It's not a question--she has his full charts (sparse though they are, since his life after his father's death could best be described as one of benign neglect)-- but it feels like one.

“Yes,” he agrees.

“Control will be glad.”

“That I run hot?”

“That you're as heavy as you are. They won't have to correct too much. You don't look it, though.”

“I'm dense,” Keith tells her, and leaves before the inevitable joke.

Eight days and he goes to see the ship he’ll be piloting, get used to the feel of it. Commander Holt looks concerned but Shiro says, “he can fly anything.” Keith didn’t ask him to be there.

Four days. Shiro finds Keith up on the roof.

“Don’t know why I didn’t look for you here sooner.”

“This is the first time I’ve come here since the sim run.”

“Must be fate then.” Shiro sits next to Keith but keeps a careful distance between them.

Keith still can’t bear to look at him. He feels like his chest is going to burst.

“I’m sorry,” he says at the same time Shiro tells him:

“I don’t blame you.”

Keith does look at him then. His eyes are tinged red and he looks tired, and so young, suddenly, and the sight makes Keith feel wonderful and terrible all at once, so he does what he does best, and lunges forward to kiss Shiro.

Shiro gasps (surprised, happy—Keith has kept a catalog) against Keith’s lips. He lets Keith press into his space until Shiro is crowded up against the concrete lip of the roof.

The whole time Keith is apologizing, half of the time with his actual words.

Shiro’s hands clutch helplessly at Keith’s waist, a grounding but futile touch. Keith already feels like he’s left the Earth behind, and Shiro’s palms and their heat are only an echo of what he’d had.

Three days. Shiro has obviously forgiven him (though he would say there’s nothing to forgive) but Keith cannot quite forgive himself. They lie in bed together long after they’ve woken up, not talking, not touching beyond the casual press of their thighs, just breathing in the same space. It hadn’t seemed like anything special to Keith, before, but now, 72 hours out, he wants to bottle this memory so that he can go back to it and find it perfectly preserved when he misses Shiro.

“You should probably go,” Shiro says. He sounds miserable about it.

“Why?”

“You have things to do, I’m sure. To prepare or whatever.”

Keith shrugs. “It’s just a ship. The controls aren’t really much different from the sim.”

“You’re not nervous at all?” Shiro asks. Keith looks away. He can’t bear the strange, admiring look that Shiro is giving him.

“Were you?” That’s cruel, Keith thinks, even as it leaves his mouth. “I mean, would you be?”

Shiro’s smile doesn’t have the edge Keith expected. “Of course I was. I was just way more excited. It’s a lot different from just doing a sim course.”

“Well, of course,” Keith agrees. “But I raced hoverbikes, remember? You’re way more likely to die doing that than piloting a Garrison ship.”

“That’s just because there haven’t been enough manned missions to compare the two.” Shiro’s voice sounds sour, so Keith turns back to him, as though looking at Shiro’s face will tell him what’s wrong. He’s never had that skill with anyone, and hasn’t had enough time to learn Shiro well enough to develop it for him.

Shiro’s mouth is pinched in a little; the lines it makes at the corners of his lips are unfamiliar. He doesn’t look angry, or sad in any way that Keith has seen before.

“I just mean,” Keith starts. “I just mean you don’t need to worry about me.”

“Because you’re not afraid to die.” 

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what did you mean?”

Keith doesn’t know. That’s the honest answer. He’d never seriously considered how badly the mission could end; when he thought that he might die out in space the thought had had the same sheen as an idle fantasy. The only reason this mission is any sort of big deal is because it’s the first in a while, and that’s only because Garrison funding is an overly political issue. If it weren’t for that, this would be basically routine. It’s basically a fetch quest from a video game, as far as Keith’s concerned. 

Racing had been completely different. He’d taken a nasty fall early on, before he got the hang of making a tight turn while changing his altitude. His helmet had likely saved his life, but he still came out of the experience heavily bruised. One of his ribs might have been cracked, too. He never went to a doctor, obviously. He didn’t have insurance, didn’t have money to spare, didn’t have anyone to lean on during recovery. So he’d wrapped the offending part of his torso, bought a new, less-cheap helmet, and set in to upgrade and repair his bike while he waited for breathing to stop being painful.

“That,” he pauses. “I’m not worried that we’re going to die. I don’t think it’ll happen.”

Shiro narrows his eyes. Keith knows he’s unsatisfied with Keith’s answer, but Keith doesn’t get why. If he really had a death wish, Shiro would have figured that out by now.

“I’m just telling you why I’m not nervous,” he tells Shiro.

Shiro at least stops looking so irritated. “I worry,” he tells Keith. 

“Okay.”

“About you. All the time.”

Keith hates the fact that he blushes at Shiro’s admission.

Shiro laughs. Keith scowls.

“I’m sorry! But you’re cute when you blush.”

That only makes Keith blush harder. He presses closer to Shiro anyway, so that they’re touching from shoulder to ankle. Shiro scoots in closer.

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

That makes Shiro unhappy. Keith can tell, because he goes tense everywhere that Keith can feel, and he turns to look at Keith. That’s one thing about him that Keith doesn’t like; whenever Shiro is upset by something Keith says (usually about himself) he pulls back and looks Keith straight in the eyes. It’s impossible to run away from. Not that Keith is in the habit of running, of course.

“I want to,” Shiro says. Normally Keith would expect him to be firm on this point, as effortlessly confident as he is in almost everything else in his life. Instead, he sounds timid. As though he’s afraid of what Keith will say in response to him.

Keith probably could hurt him in this moment. The realization is like a rush of blood to the head, like he’s stood up to fast and the world is greying out around him.

He’s going to leave Shiro behind before the week is out. He’s going to be gone for a long time. A lot could change on the ground; Shiro could change. He could wake up one morning, months from now, and realize that there’s no reason for him to be waiting for Keith.

Keith could go, and change. There could be things out there in the yawning void that he has never even dreamed of. He could die, and though the idea itself doesn’t frighten him too much, the thought that he would never see Shiro again is crippling.

Keith is taking everything away from Shiro. He owes him this, at least.

“No one’s ever worried about me before.

“That can’t be true.” 

“I mean, not since my dad died.”

Shiro looks wounded. Keith is a little insulted. His life hasn’t been a cakewalk, but he doesn’t need Shiro looking at him like he’s in an ad for a children’s charity.

“I guess that explains some things.”

“I’m not stunted, if that’s what you’re trying to say.” The joke lands badly. Shiro wraps his arm around Keith and pulls him in so that his head is resting on Shiro’s shoulder, and his thumb starts to stroke lazily down Keith’s neck.

“No, not at all. You’re perfect.”

Keith snorts. Shiro’s hand continued it’s ministrations until Keith has almost been lulled back to sleep. He has no idea what time it is; he feels like he exists apart from the world right now. 

“I don’t want you to die,” Shiro says, finally. His voice is small.

Tears spring to Keith’s eyes, unbidden.

“I don’t even want to think about you dying in the past. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it.”

Keith is crying, as softly as he can. Shiro must know; there’s no way he could not, but he doesn't say anything. Keith is fiercely grateful. He turns his face into Shiro’s neck, and lets his tears dampen the soft, warm skin there.

“I know you’ll be fine,” Shiro continues. This must be something he’s thought about a lot, because his speech has the cadence of one of his class presentations. “I don’t even think the mission’s going to be dangerous at all. Obviously. I’d go myself. If it wouldn’t delay everything by months and try to force them to let me go, too.

But, I don’t know. I think about you, so far out there, and it does something to me.”

Keith does his best to stay still and quiet. He’s not a particularly loud (or frequent crier). Shiro is a pretty talkative person generally, but he doesn’t do this. He doesn’t talk to Keith at length about his feelings. Probably out of consideration for Keith, who gets through those sorts of conversations by muttering, mostly. Keith owes him this. He’s leaving. Shiro deserves to let Keith know how he feels, in all the detail he wants. So Keith tries to calm his hiccuping sobs, and lets Shiro keep talking.

“I’m going to miss you so much. That better not be a surprise. But it makes me sad to think of you being alone, too. I mean, I like the Holts, but you don’t know them that well. Matt can be kind of a lot to take in, at first. You should give him a chance anyway, though. 

I’m sure you’re loving this monologue, by the way. But I want to tell you everything before you go. Just in case.”

Keith’s breath catches.

“I’ve never felt like this before.” Shiro huffs out a laugh that Keith feels more than hears. “Which is a pretty corny thing to say, but I guess this is the sort of situation where you get to be corny. But it’s true. I don’t even have the words for it. I want everything for you. I want you to be happy. I want to make you happy.”

 _You do_ , Keith thinks. He knows what’s coming.

“I love you.”

Seeing the light of an oncoming train is nothing like being hit by it.

Keith doesn’t know how long he stays there without saying anything, but it must be long enough, because he hears Shiro call his name.

He pulls away from Shiro’s neck and moves instead to straddle him.

“I love you too,” he says, before he leans in. “I’ll come back. I love you.” 

Saying it, he’s never felt freer.

Two days. He meets Commander Holt’s wife and daughter in passing. They give him calculating looks, and he feels compelled to promise that their family will come back to them. He thinks of Shiro’s face when Keith had said he’d come back, and doesn’t feel bad about the declaration. Mrs. Holt shakes his hand and nods with a solemnity that seems somehow out of place. The sister--Katie, he remembers Matt saying--still looks suspicious, but her mother shepherds her off before she can actually say anything about it.

One day. He and Shiro have lunch with Matt and Commander Holt. It’s awkward, to say the least. Shiro and Matt are friendly, and Commander Holt treats Shiro like another son, or maybe like a beloved nephew. Keith feels peripheral, even though Shiro is right there, bringing him into the conversation, drawing stories out of him with practiced ease. Keith loves him.

When they part, Commander Holt claps Keith on the shoulder and says, “Looking forward to tomorrow.”

Shiro smiles at him the whole way back to his room.

Launch day. Keith wakes early, full of adrenaline. He has a few hours before he needs to report to the ship. Shiro wakes up when he’s getting out of bed, and Keith has to fight the urge to get back in bed with him.

Shiro kisses him, long and lush, against the wall. Keith’s hands can’t stay still, itching with the need to commit every inch of Shiro to memory. Shiro must feel the same way. He doesn’t get much else done for the rest of the morning. 

When he’s finally in his flight suit and ready to go, Shiro kisses him once more. “I’m proud of you,” his whispers. “I love you.”

Keith is never going to get used to hearing that. If this is the last time, he thinks, and quashes the thought.

“I love you too,” he whispers, and then, to puncture the bubble that’s forming around them, he adds, “I’ll bring you a souvenir.”

Shiro laughs and follows him out of the door. 

Shiro stays to see them off, lays a large hand on the juncture of Keith’s neck and shoulder until the last possible moment. Keith is barely listening to mission control’s last instructions, too focused on the searing the warmth of Shiro’s touch into his skin.

He straps in, prepares for the launch. There’s no longer anyway for him to see Shiro, no matter what he does, so he takes a deep breath through his nose and says a private goodbye. He exhales and lets the longing go, for now, and leans into the future.

Keith knows, even if he can’t see, that Shiro stays there long after they’ve broken orbit, watching as Keith plunges into the sprawling darkness.


End file.
